The 100 most popular musicians on Twitter: get the full list

Twitter launched its standalone music app yesterday following a week long beta release for selected musicians. We've taken a look at musicians on Twitter and it looks like the decision to give music special treatment is backed up by the data.

Eight of the ten most followed Twitter accounts are musicians, with teen favourites Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Katy Perry claiming the top three spots, each boasting over 35m followers. The President of the United States, Barack Obama, is the first non-musician on the list, ranked fourth.

Even when we broaden the scope to the 100 most followed accounts, half of them are musicians. The remainder consist largely of celebrities from the film, sport or TV industries plus some news organisations and digital brands.

Click on the buttons below to see musicians' share of the top20, top50, top100, top250.

Of the current top 100 musicians on Twitter, 57 come from the US, where most of Twitter's users are based. The UK comes in second with 14 representatives, although it's worth noting that six of those are from British-Irish boyband One Direction (the band's official account plus each member's account).

At the time of writing it takes 3.3m followers to make it onto the list of the top 100 most popular music artists on Twitter. For a spot in the top 10, more than 16m followers are needed. On average, musicians who made it onto the list have been on Twitter for 49 months, since early 2009. Most of them have been avid tweeters since (or, more likely than not, had avid tweeters take care of their accounts). The median number of tweets sent from those musicians' accounts stands at 4,425.

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